Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood: Partners in Command

Epilogue

169 Epilogue They were two ambitious, driving men, nearly obsessed with power, both personal and national. Oddly, Theodore Roosevelt, a master politician, fancied himself a soldier. Leonard Wood, a great soldier and administrator, flirted with the idea he had political talents as well. Both were wrong. TR would have been a disaster as a regular officer; Wood, who inherited Roosevelt’s delegates at the Republican National Convention of 1920, was never taken seriously. They were extremely different personalities: the gregarious, outgoing Roosevelt and the more aloof Wood. But their talents supplemented each other, with results that have put the nation in their debt. Their most important achievement came in the years just preceding America’s entry into the Great War. At the Plattsburg training camp, and others, they began to plant the seeds for training an officer corps, so essential to a fighting force at a time when military preparedness was not only unsupported but viewed with hostility by President Woodrow Wilson. Their other great accomplishment was the recasting of the Army staff, on paper by President Roosevelt in 1904, and by Leonard Wood as chief of staff in the Taft administration. Yet despite these stellar accomplishments, they would have been forgotten were it not for their creditable but relatively unimportant day in the Cuban campaign of 1898 when they charged up San Juan (Kettle) Hill on July 1. The “Rough Riders of San Juan Hill” will always be their claim to fame. That fact is ironic. One is reminded of the limerick by the humorist Edward Lear: A goddess capricious is Fame You may strive to make noted your name. But she either neglects you Or cruelly selects you For laurels distinct from your aim. ...